Romanticizing Intolerance
Many of you who are known to support Israel likely received the same link through a well-meaning friend’s email, pointing to a YouTube that you had to see to believe. Finally, someone with the...
Category: Judaism
The Past in the Present
“I [had] promised [myself] that I would go to Bialystok and something was telling me – maybe it was because I was stubborn — I said I am going to yeshiva and I’m going to go.”
A Cautionary Tale
The headline says it all: “Court orders Orthodox woman to be cremated after three-month battle.” Ethel Baar, who died on September 11, began following Orthodox Judaism late in life, and her great-nephew James Pollak...
The Next Silent Problem After Abuse
There is much more reason for us to feel guilty about the problem of abuse in our community than ever before. A hundred years ago, there was abuse. In a teshuva of the Bais...
Hashgacha Within The Embers
Part of the most recent update from the firelines by Prof. Menachem Kellner of University of Haifa may be a good illustration of the old saw that anyone who believes all the stories about...
A Chanukah Primer With a Pretext
Man bites dog is news; the New York Times getting the starting date of Chanukah wrong is not news. In regard to the Howard Jacobson op-ed on the subject, everything else about the piece...
Shedding Light on Anti-Semitism
What motivates the would-be Chanukah-diminishers, I suspect, is their discomfort with Chanukah’s elemental message.
Fighting Fire With Water
Our Jewish danger-sensors must be turned on always, but our Jewish brains no less.
Teaching Emunah to Our Children
I was honored with a last-minute invitation to participate in Ami Magazine‘s Premier issue, which appeared yesterday. I responded with the following essay. In general, I like what the editors did — this original...
The Yeshiva Bochur YouTube and its Discontents
No, I don’t applaud the now-infamous YouTube– but I do not agree with much of the criticism leveled against it. To co-opt the phraseology of another writer on the topic, I am a “maximalist”...
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